On inauguration day, George Mitchell became Obama's man in the Middle East. Mitchell won his negotiating spurs in North Ireland, bringing peace to an extended period of violence between Catholic Irish sympathizers and Protestant sympathizers with the British. The issue was who should rule the land.

The issue in Palestine is basically similar, but with a very different history.
Both sides in North Ireland had lived side by side for centuries. Not so in Palestine. The Jews were kicked out of Jerusalem early in the Christian era and spent two millennia in Diaspora. When they started migrating to Palestine in the early 20th Century, they were more or less welcomed at first with indifference. But that changed with the
Balfour Declaration. wherein Britain, France and Italy signed on. The trouble was that each donated a state that did not belong to any of them, to a state that did not exist! Nevertheless, the Zionists took full advantage and began building a base and infrastructure needed to establish a country of their own. They fought violently against British control.

Since then, many wars have failed to bring peace to the region. It has brought the opposite in fact, just as one of their kind predicted,
Ze'ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky,
predicted. See
Zionism
For the subsequent violent history where Palestinians were uprooted and shier villages razed.

The Palestinians view the Zionists as invaders. And true to the history of invasions, the natives fought back. Sometimes with armies, more often with terror. So there are two sides to this coin. The UN gave Israel legitimacy regarding its original borders. But the Zionists have greatly expanded their control through a series of wars since then. Their continued domination and settlements of conquered ground has only aggravated and emboldened the opposing Palestinians.

The current situation is dire, one has not only discredited Israel, but alienated allies, except the United States. So with a change in administration, it is time once again to take stock. For that we turn to Uri Avnery, the sage of Israel itself, and equally importantly, a Jew watching things from the inside. No outsider can match his insights. He founded Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace movement. He "calls for the re-invigoration of the peace movement by direct engagement with politics." Read on for a nearly-complete excerpt of his views.

"Of all the beautiful phrases in Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, these
are the words that stuck in my mind: 'You are on the wrong side of history.'

"He was talking about the tyrannical regimes of the world. But we, too, should
ponder these words.

"In the last few days I have heard a lot of declarations from Ehud Barak,
Tzipi Livni, Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Olmert. And every time, these eight
words came back to haunt me: “You are on the wrong side of history!”

"Obama was speaking as a man of the 21st century. Our leaders speak the language
of the 19th century. They resemble the dinosaurs which once terrorized their
neighborhood and were quite unaware of the fact that their time had already
passed. ...

"All the preceding 43 presidents were white Protestants, except John Kennedy,
who was a white Catholic. 38 of them were the descendants of immigrants from
the British isles. Of the other five, three were of Dutch ancestry (Theodor
and Franklin D. Roosevelt , as well as Martin van Buren) and two of German
descent (Herbert Hoover and Dwight Eisenhower.)

"The face of Obama’s family is quite different. The extended family includes
whites and the descendents of black slaves, Africans from Kenya, Indonesians,
Chinese from Canada, Christians, Muslims and even one Jew (a converted African-American).
The two first names of the president himself, Barack Hussein, are Arabic.

"This is the face of the new American nation – a mixture of races, religions,
countries of origin and skin-colors, an open and diverse society, all of whose
members are supposed to be equal and to identify themselves with the ”founding
fathers”. The American Barack Hussein Obama, whose father was born in a Kenyan
village, can speak with pride of “George Washington, the father of our nation”,
of the “American Revolution” (the war of independence against the British),
and hold up the example of “our ancestors”, who include both the white pioneers
and the black slaves who “endured the lash of the whip”. ...

"Israel is the product of the narrow nationalism of the 19th century, a nationalism
that was closed and exclusive, based on race and ethnic origin, blood and
earth. Israel is a “Jewish State”, and a Jew is a person born Jewish or converted
according to Jewish religious law (Halakha). Like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia,
it is a state whose mental world is to a large extent conditioned by religion,
race and ethnic origin.

"When Ehud Barak speaks about the future, he speaks the language of past centuries,
in terms of brute force and brutal threats, with armies providing the solution
to all problems. That was also the language of George W. Bush who last week
slinked out of Washington, a language that already sounds to the Western ear
like an echo from the distant past.

"The words of the new president are ringing in the air: “Our power alone cannot
protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please.” The key words were
“humility and restraint”.

"Our leaders are now boasting about their part in the Gaza War, in which unbridled
military force was unleashed intentionally against a civilian population,
men, women and children, with the declared aim of “creating deterrence”. In
the era that began last Tuesday, such expressions can only arouse shudders.
...

"The first signs are small. In his inaugural speech, Obama proclaimed that
'We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and nonbelievers.'
Since when? Since when do the Muslims precede the Jews? What has happened
to the “Judeo-Christian Heritage”? (A completely false term to start with,
since Judaism is much closer to Islam than to Christianity. For example: neither
Judaism nor Islam supports the separation of religion and state.)

"The very next morning, Obama phoned a number of Middle East leaders. He decided
to make a quite unique gesture: placing the first call to Mahmoud Abbas, and
only the next to Olmert. The Israeli media could not stomach that. Haaretz,
for example, consciously falsified the record by writing - not once but twice
in the same issue - that Obama had called “Olmert, Abbas, Mubarak and King
Abdallah” (in that order).

"Instead of the group of American Jews who had been in charge of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict during both the Clinton and Bush administrations, Obama, on his very
first day in office, appointed an Arab-American, George Mitchell, whose mother
had come to America from Lebanon at age 18, and who himself, orphaned from
his Irish father, was brought up in a Maronite Christian Lebanese family.

"These are not good tidings for the Israeli leaders. For the last 42 years,
they have pursued a policy of expansion, occupation and settlements in close
cooperation with Washington. They have relied on unlimited American support,
from the massive supply of money and arms to the use of the veto in the Security
Council. This support was essential to their policy. This support may now
be reaching its limits.

"It will happen, of course, gradually. The pro-Israel lobby in Washington
will continue to put the fear of God into Congress. A huge ship like the United
States can change course only very slowly, in a gentle curve. But the turn-around
started already on the first day of the Obama administration.

"This could not have happened, if America itself had not changed. That is
not a political change alone. It is a change in the world-view, in mental
outlook, in values. A certain American myth, which is very similar to the
Zionist myth, has been replaced by another American myth. Not by accident
did Obama devote to this so large a part of his speech (in which, by the way,
there was not a single word about the extermination of the Native Americans).

"The Gaza War, during which tens of millions of Americans saw the horrible
carnage in the Strip (even if rigorous self-censorship cut out all but a tiny
part), has hastened the process of drifting apart. Israel, the brave little
sister, the loyal ally in Bush’s 'War on Terror,' has turned into the violent
Israel, the mad monster, which has no compassion for women and children, the
wounded and the sick. And when winds like these are blowing, the Lobby loses
height.

"The leaders of official Israel do not notice it. They do not feel, as Obama
put it in another context, that “the ground has shifted beneath them”. They
think that this is no more than a temporary political problem that can be
set right with the help of the Lobby and the servile members of Congress.

"Our leaders are still intoxicated with war and drunk with violence. They
have re-phrased the famous saying of the Prussian general, Carl von Clausewitz
into: 'War is but a continuation of an election campaign by other means.'
They compete with each other with vainglorious swagger for their share of
the 'credit.' Tzipi Livni, who cannot compete with the men for the crown of
warlord, tries to outdo them in toughness, in bellicosity, in hard-heartedness.

"The most brutal is Ehud Barak. Once I called him a 'peace criminal,' because
he brought about the failure of the 2000 Camp David conference and shattered
the Israeli peace camp. Now I must call him a 'war criminal,' as the person
who planned the Gaza War knowing that it would murder masses of civilians.

"In his own eyes, and in the eyes of a large section of the public, this is
a military operation which deserves all praise. His advisors also thought
that it would bring him success in the elections. The Labor party, which had
been the largest party in the Knesset for decades, had shrunk in the polls
to 12, even 9 seats out of 120. With the help of the Gaza atrocity it has
now gone up to 16 or so. That’s not a landslide, and there’s no guarantee
that it will not sink again.

"What was Barak’s mistake? Very simply: every war helps the Right. War, by
its very nature, arouses in the population the most primitive emotions – hate
and fear, fear and hate. These are the emotions on which the Right has been
riding for centuries. Even when it’s the ”Left” that starts a war, it’s still
the Right that profits from it. In a state of war, the population prefers
an honest-to-goodness Rightist to a phony Leftist.

"This is happening to Barak for the second time. When, in 2000, he spread
the mantra; 'I have turned every stone on the way to peace; I have made the
Palestinians unprecedented offers; they have rejected everything; there is
no one to talk with.'-- he succeeded not only in blowing the Left to smithereens,
but also in paving the way for the ascent of Ariel Sharon in the 2001 elections.
Now he is paving the way for Binyamin Netanyahu (hoping, quite openly, to
become his minister of defense).

"And not only for him. The real victor of the war is a man who had no part
in it at all: Avigdor Liberman. His party, which in any normal country would
be called fascist, is steadily rising in the polls. Why? Liberman looks and
sounds like an Israeli Mussolini, he is an unbridled Arab-hater, a man of
the most brutal force. Compared to him, even Netanyahu looks like a softie.
A large part of the young generation, nurtured on years of occupation, killing
and destruction, after two atrocious wars, considers him a worthy leader.

"While the US has made a giant jump to the left, Israel is about to jump even
further to the right.

"Anyone who saw the millions milling around Washington on inauguration day
knows that Obama was not speaking only for himself. He was expressing the
aspirations of his people, the Zeitgeist.

"Between the mental world of Obama and the mental world of Liberman and Netanyahu
there is no bridge. Between Obama and Barak and Livni, too, there yawns an
abyss. Post-election Israel may find itself on a collision course with
post-election America.

"Where are the American Jews? The overwhelming majority of them voted for
Obama. They will be between the hammer and the anvil – between their government
and their natural adherence to Israel. It is reasonable to assume that this
will exert pressure from below on the “leaders” of American Jewry, who have
incidentally never been elected by anyone, and on organizations like AIPAC.
The sturdy stick, on which Israeli leaders are used to lean in times of trouble,
may prove to be a broken reed.

"Europe, too, is not untouched by the new winds. True, at the end of the war
we saw the leaders of Europe – Sarkozy, Merkel, Browne and Zapatero – sitting
like schoolchildren behind a desk in class, respectfully listening to the
most loathsome arrogant posturing from Ehud Olmert, reciting his text after
him. They seemed to approve the atrocities of the war, speaking of the Qassams
and forgetting about the occupation, the blockade and the settlements. Probably
they will not hang this picture on their office walls.

"But during this war masses of Europeans poured into the streets to demonstrate
against the horrible events. The same masses saluted Obama on the day of his
inauguration.

"This is the new world. Perhaps our leaders are now dreaming of the slogan:
“Stop the world, I want to get off!” But there is no other world.

"Yes we are now on the wrong side of history.

"Fortunately, there is also another Israel. It is not in the limelight, and
its voice is heard only by those who listen out for it. This is a sane, rational
Israel, with its face to the future, to progress and peace. In these coming
elections, its voice will barely be heard, because all the old parties are
standing with their two feet squarely in the world of yesterday.

"... The huge majority of Israelis know that we cannot exist without close
ties with the US. Obama is now the leader of the world, and we live in this
world. When he promises to work “aggressively” for peace between us and the
Palestinians, that is a marching order for us....

There is not much to add to this. Of course, politics being plastic and opportunistic, may avoid the collision Avnery predicts. Nevertheless, Avnery's voice needs to be listened to. Violence begets only more violence. Its master manipulators must be exposed not only to the world, but to the good people of Israel.

Hamas is now stronger than ever.

Why?

Nevertheless, it is a fact that the tides are flowing in opposite ways in Washington and Tel Aviv. This trend deserves close watching, for as Palestine goes, so goes the Middle East.